Microsoft's New Copilot App Brings Home, Code and Autopilot Into One Place

Microsoft announced a redesigned Copilot app on Friday that puts chat, delegated tasks, app building and an always-on agent into one interface. It is the company's clearest attempt yet to turn Copilot into what CEO Satya Nadella now calls "a new OS for work."

The app is organised around three tabs: Home, Code and Autopilot. Autopilot is the new name for Scout, the personal agent Microsoft introduced at Build in June. Microsoft is also changing how it charges for Copilot, moving the more demanding agentic features to usage-based billing.

"Just as Office defined work for the PC era, the new Copilot is built to define it for the AI era," Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing officer for AI at work, said in the company's announcement.

Home: Chat, Cowork and Office in one starting point

Home is the new default screen. It combines two ways of working that Microsoft previously presented separately.

• Chat is the quick, conversational mode for questions, lookups and first drafts.
• Cowork is for handing off work. You describe a task, such as an RFP response or a customer briefing, and it runs end to end and returns a finished result. Cowork became generally available in June.

Microsoft says that "coming soon," users won't have to choose a mode. Copilot will route each request to Chat, Cowork or Code on its own.

The other big addition is Office in Copilot, which builds Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the Copilot experience. Microsoft says Copilot now creates or updates "a real, editable document, workbook or presentation" that stays in sync with the Office apps. Teammates can be @mentioned, and their edits appear as they make them.

Microsoft also previewed Today, a personalised dashboard inside Home. It pulls together mail, calendar, Teams threads and tasks, with drafts and schedule changes already prepared. Today enters private preview in October.

Code: app building for people who don't code

Code is the most surprising part of the launch. The Verge's Tom Warren called it "not one you'd typically associate with an app designed for knowledge workers."

The idea is that anyone can describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in plain language, and Copilot will build it. Results can range from desktop widgets to cloud-hosted internal apps that can be shared with a team.

Microsoft says Code is "powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot" and runs in a sandboxed environment that can be hosted in a customer's own tenant. Professional developers are not being asked to switch. Microsoft says they "continue to use GitHub Copilot for their day-to-day work."

To run what people build, Microsoft is introducing Copilot Managed Runtime, hosting infrastructure that runs code inside a company's Microsoft 365 environment and is "governed by IT." It is in preview now and will be available inside Code. Microsoft says it will also open the runtime to third-party and pro-code developers.

According to CNBC, users in the Code tab can pick their own model, including a lower-cost Microsoft model. In the Home tab, there is no Microsoft model available.

Autopilot: Scout becomes a cloud teammate

Autopilot is Microsoft's persistent agent. Spataro describes it as a "digital teammate." You give it a name, a role and a goal. It then watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and returns to projects days later "without waiting for a prompt."

When Microsoft introduced Scout at Build on June 2, it was a desktop app for Windows and macOS. It was available only through the Frontier early-access program, and it was built on the open-source OpenClaw project. The Verge describes Autopilot as the cloud version, able to keep running while the user is asleep.

The enterprise pitch rests on identity. "Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace," Microsoft says. It appears in Teams, Outlook, chats and documents, where people can @mention it like a colleague, "with permissions, audit and governance behind it." Microsoft's June Scout announcement said each such agent runs under "its own governed Entra identity, not a shared, anonymous service account."

Key takeaway: Microsoft's advantage is not model quality. It is that Autopilot sits inside the identity, permissions and audit systems that most large companies already run on Microsoft.

Rollout timeline

Most of the new app is starting in Microsoft's Frontier program, which gives enrolled organisations early access to experimental AI features. Here is the schedule as Microsoft described it on September 25.

Microsoft's post is not fully consistent about Code. One passage says Home and Code start rolling out to Frontier "in the coming weeks." Another says Code reaches Frontier "at the end of the month," followed by broad availability "in the coming weeks." Admins should expect dates to vary by tenant.

Pricing: subscriptions for chat, meters for agents

Microsoft is splitting Copilot spending into two parts.

1. User subscription license (USL): a fixed per-user cost that covers Copilot Chat, Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, model selection, and "Auto," which routes each request to a model based on accuracy, speed and cost. CNBC notes the commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot license costs $30 per user per month.
2. Usage-based billing (UBB): metered pricing for Cowork, Code, Autopilot, other long-running agentic features, and frontier models Microsoft names as "Astra and Fable."

Usage-based billing is already in place for Cowork. When Cowork became generally available in June, Microsoft began charging for it in Copilot Credits. Pay-as-you-go credits cost $0.01 each, and a prepaid plan offers discounts. The cost of each task depends on the model, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime. Friday's announcement did not list specific rates for Code or Autopilot.

To manage the meter, Microsoft is expanding what it calls FinOps for AI. Cost management in Agent 365 now extends beyond Cowork to Code and Copilot Managed Runtime, with Copilot Studio agents planned for October. Admins can:

• set spending policies through an API
• send users' credit requests into existing approval workflows
• control which model families different groups can use, which also limits what Auto can pick

Users will be able to see their own credit balance and usage history in Copilot.

Microsoft's Copilot chief suggests cost will not be the product's first priority. "This product is at its best when it's just optimizing for user value and for the quality of the output," Jacob Andreou, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot, told CNBC. He added that cost efficiency matters less.

The competition: catching up with Anthropic and OpenAI

Microsoft is launching this from a weaker position than its Office dominance might suggest. According to CNBC, fewer than 7% of Microsoft's more than 450 million commercial Office 365 seats have a Copilot license. CNBC also reports that the enterprise market has been consolidating around bundled products from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Andreou acknowledged to CNBC that adding coding to the app is Microsoft playing catch-up. At a customer preview in Seattle on Wednesday, he framed the opportunity this way: "The problem is that these agents have been almost impossible to bring into the enterprise."

There is an awkward overlap here. Microsoft competes with Anthropic and OpenAI but also depends on their models. CNBC reports the company is "still leaning on the foremost models from OpenAI and Anthropic" while it develops its own. Cowork itself originally ran on Anthropic models before Microsoft added model choice in June.

The consumer picture is harder still. The Verge wrote that Copilot "has failed in the consumer space compared to Claude or ChatGPT." Microsoft is now marketing the product as "the AI built for work." CNBC also points to fresh pressure from Meta's Muse app, which climbed to the top of Apple's App Store this month.

Governance questions for IT admins

Giving an agent its own identity makes it easier to audit. It also raises new questions for IT, and they are timely: this week's disclosure that an OpenAI research agent got into an Australian government statistics portal has put agent containment back in the headlines. Microsoft has described the controls in broad terms, but many details will only become clear in preview.

Questions worth putting to your Microsoft account team:

1. What can Autopilot touch? Find out which permissions an Autopilot identity starts with, whether it inherits the creator's access, and how its scope is limited.
2. What needs approval? Scout's documentation lists admin policies for requiring approval of tool actions, blocking tool servers and restricting browser destinations. Check which of these carry over to the cloud-hosted Autopilot.
3. Where does data go? Scout required a separate admin attestation because it could route data to third-party inference paths such as GitHub. Ask whether Code and Autopilot have similar data flows, especially when non-Microsoft models are selected.
4. Who owns the apps people build? Code and Managed Runtime make it easy for non-developers to ship internal tools. Decide in advance who reviews, maintains and retires them.
5. How are agents offboarded? An agent with its own identity, memory and computer needs a lifecycle policy, just like an employee account.
6. What stops a runaway bill? Set tenant, group and user caps before turning on long-running agents, not after the first invoice.

The central plugin registry, where IT approves Microsoft, partner and custom plugins in one catalogue, should help. It is still rolling out.

FAQ

When can my organisation use the new Copilot app?

Only if you are enrolled in Microsoft's Frontier program, at least initially. Home and Code are rolling out there over the coming weeks, and Autopilot enters private preview at the end of September. Code previews for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.

Is Autopilot the same as Cowork?

No. Cowork takes a task you define and returns a finished result. Autopilot is a persistent agent with its own identity that keeps working over days, watching channels and handling follow-ups without being prompted each time.

How much will Code and Autopilot cost?

Microsoft says both run on usage-based billing, but it has not published specific rates. Cowork, which already uses the same model, is billed in Copilot Credits at $0.01 each on pay-as-you-go, with task costs varying by model and complexity.

Do developers need to switch from GitHub Copilot?

No. Microsoft says Code is aimed at knowledge workers building small tools, and that software developers will keep using GitHub Copilot, which is getting deeper connections to the Copilot platform.

The bottom line

The new Copilot is Microsoft's most coherent AI product pitch so far: one app, one identity layer and one billing system for chat, delegation, building and autonomous agents. Whether it closes the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI depends on quality and price, and Microsoft has not yet published either for Code and Autopilot. For IT teams, the job now is to set spending caps and agent permissions before the previews arrive, not after.